In automotive transmission systems it is often necessary to remove certain components, especially clutches, from the remainder of the system after they have been damaged by an accident or by improper operation on the part of the driver. Since fluid-actuated clutches require both mechanical and fluidic connections, their disassembly and reassembly is relatively complicated. In heavy-duty vehicles such as tractors, for example, conventional systems necessitate a virtual dismantling of the vehicle for this purpose.
It has already been proposed (see commonly owned German published specification No. 1,600,233) to provide a demountable clutch whose casing, acting as a counterbearing, is bolted onto a coupling flange rigid with a first shaft while an axially slidable coupling sleeve has axially extending teeth in mesh with similar teeth on a second shaft, these two sets of teeth being held together by a cap nut secured by a grub screw against detachment. In order to enable a removal of this clutch, the counterbearing must be detached from the coupling flange whereupon the cap nut is unscrewed from the second shaft to allow disengagement of the teeth thereof from those of the sleeve by an axial shift of the latter. The coupling sleeve of this clutch, designed as a hollow shaft, is supported only at one end by the aforementioned cap nut. Such as assembly, therefore, would not be suitable for transmission systems of, say, the torque-splitting type in which two gears carried on respective shaft ends at opposite sides of the clutch casing must be precisely aligned with coacting gears on another shaft parallel thereto in order to form respective branches of a power train to be selectively established between a drive shaft and a load.